It feels like a long time since I first heard comments that e-publishing would toll the death-knell of traditional paper books. For a long time we all poo-pooed the idea – electronic readers were clumsy and clonky and would never survive being dropped into the bathwater. And e-publishing was only a last resort of the worst bad writing. And it’s not really being published, is it – not properly published, with a contract and an editor and stuff.


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onlystumbled on this gem of a site by chance and joined straight away.The only thing that dissapoints me is the plethora of vanity publishers allowed to advertise. I'm not against self publishing (done it myself)but I feel VP's are nothing more than rip off merchants.What do others think?

The premise looks good: a Los Angeles psychotherapist is consulted by a 41 year old model who can't decide whether to settle down and have kids with her staid middle-aged lover, or continue a passionate affair with a young playboy rich enough to have a pool and a butler.

Psychotherapist Nancy is played by Tessa Peake-Jones from Only Fools and Horses, who does a fine line in controlled exasperation. The older man, Philip, is Gray O'Brien, the mad-eyed charmer who terrorised Coronation Street's Gale Platt, and as the model, Lily, elegant Josefina Gabrielle resembles a slimmer Nigella Lawson. The young millionaire Dorian has almost nothing to do but Daniel Weyna makes him plausible.

So what was missing? Only a credible plot, any hint of chemistry between the actors, or vestige of witty dialogue. Some amusement was provided by the phone voices of Nancy's other patients in crisis. Tess Peake-Jones wrung laughs from the contrast between the cheerful cliches of her advice and the irritation she was feeling at her clients' behaviour. It's a bad sign, though, when the scene changes are more entertaining than the play.



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The first sign of madness is said to be talking to oneself.

As someone who lives alone, I talk to myself quite a lot. I also write to myself. I’ve kept a journal since I was a child, carefully documenting every meal I ate in childhood, every boy I had a crush on in adolescence, and every internal issue I was wrestling with in adulthood. Folder upon folder of my life - deeply uninteresting to those who might stumble across it, but somehow impossible (so far) to throw out.



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One of the things about doing Book Doctoring, as I'm doing at the Getting Published conference in October, is that you get to see a lot of beginnings of novels. And I'm beginning to think that a great many aspiring writers believe that a book isn't properly dressed without a prologue. And, to be frank, most of the prologues I see aren't earning their keep.

It's not that they're never the right thing (I have one in A Secret Alchemy, and a sort-of one in The Mathematics of Love), only that usually whatever they're supposed to be doing would be better done by other means. And because of that, agents and editors regard them with a jaundiced eye, shall we say: their experience tells them that it's not a promising start. In the interests of making a better book and improving its chances out there, I'd suggest that you ask yourself very stringently, "What is my prologue trying to do?" and then "Could I do that as better or at least as well by other means?"

1) Is it really Chapter One? A prologue is something which isn't part of the main plot/structure/chronology of the novel: it happens in a distant time or place from the main story, it's a different voice or a different character from the main thing. If it's none of these, then it's Chapter One and should be called as much.

2) Is it trying to start the novel with a bang? ...

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Is all writing cliche? (Or just mine).

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At the Frome Festival Writers' Question Time (click on Programmes > Frome Festival > Frome Festival 2011 Live Recordings) one question which came up was about keeping going: how do you deal with getting stuck? We all chipped in with our experience, from Debby Holt's Plotting Walk, to Matt Graham's printout of his mortgage payments, stuck above the monitor. At one point I mentioned the notorious Thirty Thousand Doldrums: how for some reason, at least to judge by straw polls among my writer friends, round about the 25-30,000 words seems to be the sticking point for many writers.

The odd thing is that the 30k doldrums seem to happen at that point whatever the natural length of your novels. Debi Alper gets stuck there, nearly half-way through her 75,000 word thrillers; I get stuck there when I'm only about a fifth of the way through a 140,000 word novel about history.

And then quite separately, when we were talking about planning, Rosemary Dun metioned something she's learnt from long-established creative writing teacher Roselle Angwin.

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Just a quick post - because I'm not here, I'm still in Devon - to say that the two events I took part in at the Frome Festival were recorded by Frome's very own Internet readio station, Frome FM, and can be listened to on the full version of this blog. Click on Programmes, and they both appear in the list of New Stuff. Scroll down the list of programmes a little, then click on the one you want. I will blog at some point about the experience of judging a competition, but meanwhile these are straight from the authors' mouths...

Frome Festival Writers Question Time brought together scriptwriter Matt Graham, performance oet Rosemary Dun, novelist Debbie Holt and me together. Children's writer Steve Voake was that gift of a chairman, making the most of some excellent questions to get the best and most interesting stuff out of all of us.

There was some really interesting stuff about an excellent group of stories, in the session announcing the winners of the two Frome Festival Short Story competitions.

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This article in the Bookseller (the industry magazine for booksellers (duh :)) ) is depressing reading, but there's a good deal of truth in it:

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/childrens-publishing-haemorrhaging-talent.html

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One of the questions in the Strictly Writing Quickfire slot is ‘Independent bookshop or Amazon?’ and almost all our authors, agents and poets who answer this say they use both.

I’d love to say the same. But the truth is that I almost always buy books from my local Waterstones or from Amazon.

There, I’ve fessed up.




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